Military Arrests 10 People Posing as Pensioners

The Military Pensions Board, MPB, said it arrested 10 people posing as military pensioners during the recently conducted verification exercise for retirees displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency in the North-East.

The Chairman of the board, Muhammad Dabo, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria in Abuja.

A report by Premium Times said the suspects were arrested at the venue of the exercise held in Yola, Adamawa, recently, with documents of some deceased military pensioners.

He said the suspects was handed over to the relevant authorities for further investigation and prosecution.

“We got information from various retirees that they were not able to attend the last verification exercise due to the situation as at that time.

“Some of them relocated to Cameroon and other neighbouring countries like Niger.

“We have been able to verify those that are genuine among them but we also discovered some are fake.

“Some of them are children of deceased retirees who came with the documents of dead pensioners and wanted to be enrolled as actual retirees, which is not possible.

“We also discovered that some of them wanted to use the opportunity to circumvent the process so that they can be enrolled illegally but it was blocked and we arrested about 10 of them,” he said.

Dabo said the verification exercise was one of the major achievements of the present administration in the pensions sub-sector.

He said the board had been able to update its data bank and had ascertained the exact number of military pensioners who were alive.

The chairman said the military has saved several billions of naira as many dead pensioners, whose names were hitherto on the board’s payroll, were dropped as a result of the verification.

“In the past one year, one of the achievements I can say we are proud of is the successful conduct of the last verification exercise across the country.

“We have a huge gap between what we used to pay and what we are currently paying now and that has translated into a savings which we have informed the Ministry of Budget and Planning.

“What we budgeted last year was based on the old figure prior to the verification.

“However, after the exercise we saw that there was a sharp drop in the number of existing pensioners and that has saved government huge sums of money amounting to billions of naira,” Dabo said.